excerpt of some of Shenk's text; in the op-ed itself, these function as notes to readable pictures of the Obama text -

[....] reading “Transformative Politics” today is a bracing experience.

Speaking with a candor he would soon be unable to afford, Mr. Obama directed his fire across the entire political spectrum. He denounced a broken status quo in which cynical Republicans outmaneuvered feckless Democrats in a racialized culture war, leaving most Americans trapped in a system that gave them no real control over their lives. Although his sympathies were clearly with the left, Mr. Obama chided liberals for making do with a “rudderless pragmatism,” and he flayed activists — with the civil rights establishment as his chief example — for asking the judiciary to hand out victories they couldn’t win at the polls. Progressives talked a good game about democracy, but they didn’t really seem to believe in it.

Mr. Obama did. With the right strategy, he argued, Democrats could engineer a political realignment that would begin a new chapter in the country’s history.

Mr. Obama and Mr. Fisher summarized their central arguments on the first page of this outline for “Transformative Politics,” the manuscript they hoped to turn into a book.

Later on, the outline addresses failures on the right, but Mr. Obama and Mr. Fisher began with their primary focus — the American left.

Convinced that liberals had lost their way, Mr. Obama and Mr. Fisher argued for a renewed commitment to democracy, starting with the difficult and often messy work of coalition building [....]